Month: April 2011

This guy is Blake Mycoskie, former reality television contestant, owner of Toms Shoes.

He first started off on the show “The Amazing Race”.During his trip, he came to realized that there are many children didn’t have shoes. He thus started his company with the idea of “shoes for better tomorrow”. Every pair of shoes a customer purchase; his company will donate another pair to children who need them.

His company was founded in 2006, Toms now has 160 employees and has given away more than 1 million pairs of shoes.  TOMS quickly becoming the one of the most successful shoes brand. is success came from different aspects. First, the idea of donate shoes to children in need.  He is not doing business for benefiting himself, but to the world. Most companies donate to charity once they are successful.  I have never seen company like TOMS-donate from the very beginning and continuously doing it. He started with nothing, he started with everything. He started with no money, no profit but he started with his passion and full heart. Once he started the company, his idea grabs media’s attention. His design and quality of shoes is another factor leading him to success. The design is simple and comfortable; the price is relatively fair. From high school girls and boys to Hollywood stars, they all have a pair of TOMS now. Another reason that he is so successful is because he uses social media far more than traditional advertising. This breaks the traditional role of most of the companies; meanwhile, he takes the advantage of social media and socially conscious ideals to establish a profitable business.  Promoting company by using social media saves more money compares to traditional advertising as well as grabs more people’s attention.

After coming across Jennifer Langston’s article, “Is the world ready for a baby doll that breast-feeds?”, I think a new doll that encourages little girls(or boys) to pretend to breast-feed is too much for their age.

This new product is a doll that allows kids to pretend to breast feed. Here is the doll’s website, it includes this video on how the works. From the video we can see that “a little girl straps on a halter with pink flowers over the nipple areas, lets the baby slurp away and burps it”. The marketers are obviously targeting little girls (or boys). However, little kids are not capable of walking into a store to pick their toys and pay at the cashier. Their parents are doing all that jobs for them, which means that marketers’ target market should be the parents rather than the kids. Therefore, parents’ thoughts of the toys should be taken into consideration as well. Have the marketers of the breast-feed baby doll ever done a survey on how parents view their newest product beforehand? Probably not- here is a video on how some moms think this product is. 

After the doll has launched, there are tons of negative comments like-“why would a little girl need to learn how to breast-feed before she has breasts?” and etc.

Just like Jennifer said, “this is just a toy. Kids love to mimic things they see adults doing.” I remember when I was a kid, I love brushing hair for my Barbie, I love making cupcakes for my doll, and I love changing clothes for them. However, in my opinion, pretend to breast-feed would be too much because kids are too young for it, kids don’t even know what breast feed mean and how it works. “The manufacture goes on suggest the doll may help the U.S. toward greater acceptance of breast feeding.” Frankly, why do little kids have to be educated to accept breast feeding when they are so little? There is no point to educate them when they are babies.